The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
Maria Rosa Menocal
Back Bay Books
Paperback
352 pages
April 2003

Andalusia today is as boldly industrialized, as polluted in parts and as
burdened with the complexities of modernization, as any other part of Spain.
Until recently it had been considered by some still to be an outpost of
anarchists and a home to hillbillies with a distinctly non-Castillian manner
of speaking the Spanish language, a rude place which, absent the few tourist
watering holes, had to be dragged into the late twentieth century kicking and
screaming.

Some of the Andalusian cities thought by outsiders to typify Spanish
architecture and culture -- Seville, Cordoba, Granada -- actually reveal the
heritage of the Moorish occupation, the open toleration of Sephardic Jews,
and the Catholic readiness, even after reconquest, to preserve Muslim
tradition. For a period of time in the Middle Ages, such toleration and
mixing of religions was remarkably and uniquely possible. Maria Rosa
Menocal makes us aware, in her book The Ornament of the World, that "these
three religions have a shared history that is itself part of European
history and culture. And that this was not merely a grudgingly shared
moment but instead a very long and illustrious chapter in the history of the
West."

The towns and tiny villages of Andalusia, dotted in high Sierra Nevada and
along the sparkling Mediterranean, recall this chapter and speak volumes
about it. The canto hondo, that rich singing style that cries of love --
"Consented to be a sacrifice, killed for her love, eager, like a drunk
gulping wine mixed with poison" and shouts "Shut up and kiss me!" is heard
today even in the sound of men berating their mules as they plow the fields
of wheat, "Corre Mu-lo!" No-one who has ever experienced the musical
cadences of Al-Andalus can doubt that they have stepped back into a time
when the Islamic call to prayers informed the ears of Catholic peasant
singers. White houses with red tile roofs may seem to be generically
Mediterranean, but cafe walls lined with azulejos clearly imitate the Muslim
decoration of the Alhambra and other great Islamic forts and shrines.

When Queen Isabella entered Granada in 1492 at the time of the Reconquista,
she easily inhabited the Alhambra, one of the great architectural wonders of
the world. "They not only moved into the Nasrid palaces, but the pious
Isabella had the mosque consecrated and began to worship there. These were
acts of open-armed embrace of their patrimony, unthinking acceptance of the
familiarity, not the foreignness, of places where Arabic was written on
every wall..." In other words, the Catholic monarchy, which went on to
viciously suppress the Moors, was at home in their world because it was a
world they had grown up in.

Also known as ha-Sefarad, Andalusia became a place of refuge for Jewish
scholars and poets whose adopted Arabic allowed them to express more fluidly
that which in Hebrew felt restricted. Sephardic Jews became a people in
their own right, disconnected from the mainstream of European Judaism
because they had enjoyed greater toleration and less oppression. Judh
Halevi, "the revered pillar of the Andalusian Jewish community and the most
celebrated poet of his age," was free enough to openly spurn his Andalusian
roots and make for Jerusalem, and as the author puts it, "Halevi was
rejecting -- and this was precisely what his own community found so
inexplicable -- the very premise of the commensurability of the two,
philosophy and religion." Andalusian Judaism, for many, stood for the
nondestructive nature of Greco-Islamic philosophic style and Arabized Hebrew
poetry. Halevi had the luxury of saying no to both and taking up a quest for
a purer essence. As he lamented, "How can I fulfill my vows, or do the
things I've sworn to do, while Zion is in Christian hands and I am trapped
in Arab lands?"

As Menocal is careful to detail, the bonds that connected these three
cultures -- Christian, Jewish and Islamic -- was not strong enough to survive
the intolerance of many individuals who took power from time to time. But
"the fact that it ended...in no way negates the many rewards, social as well
as cultural, of that age."

Modern visitors to the southeastern portion of Spain take in with their
very breath the attar of that rich enduring mix. We hear in the "a" and
"al" words of modern Spanish their Arabic birthright -- the charmingly
domestic alfombra, rug, almohada, pillow, and the all important
asequia -- the water channels with which the industrious Moors turned the
desert of southern Spain into a garden of earthly delight, the eponymous
ornament of the known world. For us now it is merely glorious to look upon
-- but once it was a paradise of tolerance and the peace that tolerance
brings. With this book, that older world is now a part of our newer
understanding.